…and I didn’t say a word. I just walked toward the crowd, and the crowd found me.
The first to see me was a little girl near the front of the line for the brand-forward Santa — the new fellow, who’d been smiling and nodding at her while she waved her small hands in the air, growing more and more confused, because he had no idea she was signing. She was deaf. And she was asking him a question he couldn’t answer.
She turned and saw me, and her whole face changed. I knelt down in the middle of that mall, and I signed back to her — “Hello. Merry Christmas. What is your wish?” — the way I’d taught myself to over twenty-five years. She burst into tears and threw her arms around my neck.
After that, the line just… came apart. Parents who’d sat on my knee in 1999 steered their own babies toward me. And then a mother brought over a boy of about seven, and leaned to my ear and whispered that his father had passed in the spring. I knew. His name was already on the quiet list I keep, so Santa never promises a child the one thing he cannot bring. I didn’t promise. I told that boy his dad was proud of him, and that some love doesn’t need a chimney to get through. He held on and wouldn’t let go.
The camera crew, there to film a fire truck and a brand-forward suit, filmed all of it instead.
The mall begged me back before the weekend was out. My chair was fuller than it had ever been. The new fellow, they tell me, went a different direction.
A marketing girl called a real beard a liability — never once understanding that the magic her demographic wanted was never in the suit, but in the old man who’d learned to say “Merry Christmas” with his hands, and knew exactly which children not to make promises to.